Susan Harrison Wolffis: A mother's vision of the future

Susan Harrison Wolffis I was on my way to Muskegon Community College early last Monday, traveling along Access Highway right there where L-3 Communications Combat Propulsion Systems has its tanks lined up, when suddenly I had to stop and call my mother.

Two sandhill cranes were in the field.

Those crazy looking put-together birds, tall and gangly, were feeding in the grassy area right there in plain view. They were safe, set back from the highway, but really. Sandhill cranes in the city? I pulled off to the side of the road, punched my mother’s number on my cellphone, to tell her.

That’s what I do, even at this age. When I see something miraculous, run into someone we know, witness something funny, I call my mother.

The line was busy Monday.

But that’s beside the point.

My mom was the first one I thought of when I noticed the cranes, a moment put sharply, poignantly into perspective because of where I was going.

I was headed to the college to hear Miriam Winter, a child survivor of the Holocaust, speak at a workshop for high school students sponsored by the Shoah Remembrance Committee of Muskegon and Muskegon Area Intermediate School District.

The last time Winter saw her mother, she was 8 years old, almost 70 years ago. She can neither remember her mother’s face, nor summon up the sound of her voice.

“My scared, scared mother,” Winter says, unable to go on.

Winter is the only one of her family to survive the Holocaust, and even though she says it is not a miracle that she lived, it seems like divine intervention to those who first meet her. In a desperate attempt to save her daughter from certain death in a concentration camp, Winter’s mother begged a woman she barely knew to take little Miriam with her.

“Take my daughter with you,” Miriam Winter’s mother pleaded, and at last, the woman relented. What transpired is a story of unimaginable happenstance. While on a train, the woman turned the child over to an absolute stranger. It was a harsh rescue. Miriam was regularly beaten and abused, but she lived.

In the meantime, Winter’s parents, her younger brother and grandparents, her aunts, uncles and cousins all died in the Treblinka Extermination Camp in occupied Poland. More than 800,000 Jews, most of them Polish, were murdered in the camp.

Until they were pulled apart by war, her family was like “a string of beads,” several generations living together, staying safe.

“I was born June 2, 1933, to two young parents who, as long as they could, did everything possible to save their family,” she tells the students. “But there was no place to go, and not many people willing to help.”

She doesn’t remember saying goodbye to her mother the night she fled toward the unknown. Her last image of home is hiding under a blanket in a horse-drawn cart, diligently studying a handwritten copy of the Lord’s Prayer that her mother thrust into her hands.

It is her mother’s last gift to her daughter.

In case the little girl was stopped by German soldiers, Winter could try to hide her true identity, pretending to be Christian. It was her shield to safety.

Later when just the two of us speak, I say to Winter: “What courage that must have taken for your mother. What hope she must have had ... that you would survive.”

Winter, who immigrated to the United States in 1969 at the age of 36 and settled in Jackson, Mich., looks me square in the eye. She is eloquent when she speaks, her accent heavy with the Polish language of her childhood, but she is silent for a moment.

“Yes,” she finally says. “I think of that often.”

I reach out. We take one another’s hands, Winter who cannot remember the timbre of her mother’s voice; and I, who call my mother the minute I take Winter’s leave.